


Defending the Defender

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Eliot Spencer Whump, Gen, Protective Eliot Spencer, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 06:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5530097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the job, Eliot is the one who guards, who protects the rest of them from harm.</p><p>Off the job...quis custodiate ipsos custodes?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defending the Defender

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandalaris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandalaris/gifts).



> Interestingly enough, this turned out to be almost the flip side of Teaotter's gift - instead of Eliot trying to form a connection with each of the team, we see each of them trying to protect him.
> 
> Thank you for joining us, sandalaris!

He’d waited too long. He knew even as he was listing his demands that he’d waited too long to receive the things from Eliot that were his duty to have. Nate wasn’t brave though, that was Eliot’s job. He’d never been brave – not really – and the idea of Eliot as his enforcer in a city as rife with mob activity as Boston had been quite frankly terrified him. No matter how good their intentions, it was just too much power for one person to have at their command.

And Nate Ford just didn’t trust himself enough.

But then Eliot was injured. Gravely injured as in it would be months before he was back to anything near his former self. And Nate in good conscience couldn’t avoid the truth of their situation any longer. He demanded all of it – medical surrogacy, power of attorney, a living will, spoken and written details of everything Eliot wanted for himself in the event the worst happened.

Eliot would protect the team with everything he had – that was his job and who he was. But if something went wrong, in every way that counted it would fall to _Nate_ to protect him.  
**********************************  
She understood that eventually Eliot would move out of his own way and settle into his relationship with Parker and Hardison. Until then Sophie made a point to keep an eye on every date the hitter managed for himself; sometimes in person, other times through a carefully chosen surrogate.

The poor boy thought _Parker_ was the one he needed to keep from trailing him through the more intimate moments of his private life. It was adorable, in a rather pathetic sort of way.

When she had first taken up her mission, Sophie had intended to keep clear of Eliot’s sex life. This was about cutting him free of the people he had no business taking back to his home and his bed, after all. Of course the fatal flaw in her thinking was the assumption that dates ending in sex would naturally end in Eliot’s bed. Or anybody’s bed, really.

She’d never realized voyeurism was one of her kinks before. He was a very good looking young man though, with a very healthy and imaginative sex life.

In spite of the occasional (okay, maybe more than occasional – was the man taking supplements?) distraction, Sophie Devereaux was a woman who took her chosen duty completely seriously. And to be fair, Eliot wasn’t _bad_ about choosing his companions; he was just occasionally distracted by a pretty face from seeing the poison that lurked underneath. When that happened, Sophie would intervene. Most of the time a strategic spill of red wine on a thousand dollar blouse did the trick, or a well-timed call from a police detective reporting a break-in at the person’s home or hit and run damage to their car.

The ones that set her nerves on end were typically treated to a more intimate disposition. Sophie was very good at channeling her inner sociopath when it came to defending the members of her family. One hapless young man staring directly into her eyes as she detailed every way she was going to make him pay for getting close to Eliot, believed her so completely that he’d fled the restaurant before a clueless hitter was able to make it back from the bathroom.  
*******************************  
Military to black ops, to freelance assassin for hire. Retrieval specialist, with a stint enforcing for Damien Moreau and a few lesser kingpins with delusions of grandeur – it wasn’t the sort of life a person could typically just walk away from, even though Eliot ostensibly had. Literally every time the hitter entered a scene he left behind evidence that an ambitious agent of the law looking in just the right direction could have used to bury him in a federal super-max prison or worse. 

In their early days together, Hardison had taken keeping Eliot out of law enforcement’s hands as a personal challenge of his ability to bend cyber-space to his will. As time passed and the team grew closer, Hardison’s defense of his friends in general and Eliot in particular blossomed into a passion as fierce and deep as anything he’d ever known.

He started small – well, small for him – just half a dozen strategically placed rumors about corpses found that might or might not have been Eliot Spencer. From there he built aliases for his friend and teammate, as well crafted as anything the Federal Witness Protection types could have hoped to offer participants in their programs.

Eliot was openly grateful for the effort Hardison put in on his behalf, but never enough to make either of them embarrassed. He studied each of the profiles with a diligence the hacker supposed was similar to what made him such an incredible fighter, and then placed each of them at strategic points throughout his life.

It was one of the most satisfying projects Hardison had ever seen to completion, but it was only the beginning. After the wedding job, where they’d helped a friend of Sophie’s get her husband out of jail and brought down a big time mobster, Hardison noticed a series of subtle, well-crafted probes searching for Eliot. What worried him was that they were using what was visible on the rest of the team to come uncomfortably close to the dummy personae. 

It would not stand. Hardison worked for three days on orange soda, gummi frogs and other unspeakable sources of hacker fuel, but by the end of it he’d traced the probes back to their source and infected the intrepid sleuth with enough malware to make certain whatever equipment he was using to try and root Eliot out would never recover. Another twelve hours went towards shoring up the defenses he had surrounding Eliot and the others before he allowed himself to finally sleep.

Fully awakened to how serious the situation facing his teammate was, checking on Eliot became part of Hardison’s daily routine. Most days it was a quick check – less than an hour total unless something looked off – but after every job he devoted a full day to checking and rechecking the defenses he had in place around the hitter. As Nate took them up against increasingly bad people, the odds went up exponentially that one or more of those people had history with Eliot, or that they had at least hired somebody who had history with Eliot.

After Damien Moreau and his own near death in a swimming pool, Hardison started doing his checks before the job started as well as after it was done.  
***********************************  
Ordinarily she would have respected his wish to handle things on his own, but Eliot just didn’t understand how to work solo. He kept a regular schedule when they weren’t working, had only one apartment that she’d ever been able to find, and worst of all – he dated! He had friends! The lack of strategy involved made her brain hurt.

So Parker took it on herself to watch Eliot’s back. Sophie was always telling her that she needed to learn more about people and being part of a team. One of the things she figured out early on was that the people in her team liked to do things for each other. Hardison liked to get them things – tickets to opera and theater performances for Sophie, access to all the best sports games for Nate and Hardison. Eliot liked to cook for everybody, but as far as she could tell nobody did anything for him.

They needed Eliot. He was the protector, the one who made sure everybody was safe and the bad guys didn’t have a chance to hurt them too much. Somebody needed to make sure that Eliot stayed safe so that he could do his job.

Parker could do that.

Her self-assigned mission didn’t always go as smoothly as she would have liked. Eliot was a lot better at picking up on tails than she would have assumed, given how normal he acted most of the time. He was angry too when he caught her the first time. He tried to act like he wasn’t, but Parker’s stomach had learned very early how to tell when people were angry so that she could find an elsewhere to be before they were angry at her.

“Please don’t.” She knew he was still angry – the air between them was practically vibrating with the force of it – but he had said please, and Sophie said that was important. “Don’t leave.”

“I need to be able to do some things without the rest of you looking over my shoulder,” he said, once she’d forced herself to relax. “You have how many bolt holes across the city?”

She almost answered him, but caught herself just in time. “That’s the point,” she said instead. “I know how to protect myself. I’m careful. You…” She gestured helplessly, searching for the words to describe how incredible Eliot’s lifestyle was to her. “You _date!_ ”

He laughed. Ordinarily Parker suspected she would have been insulted at his reaction to her legitimate concern for his safety, but Eliot had a nice laugh. It was a soft kind of Santa laugh – the kind she’d heard too rarely growing up. “Yes Parker,” he said, once he could finally trust himself to speak again. “I date. Frequently. And I’m still alive.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” she huffed, hands on her hips. “It’s reckless! Not even your luck can hold out forever!” Her frustration with Eliot was beginning to ebb though, as she started to suspect this was one of those things where she was missing a key piece of the puzzle; some experience that if her upbringing had been different would make the hitter’s behavior okay.

Silence fell between them. Parker could see Eliot thinking through the situation – his face had always been very readable to her; in fact, she remembered being surprised when Sophie called him inscrutable. The longer she waited for him to say something though, the more certain Parker was that she couldn’t give up watching his back. Eliot was too important – to the team and to her. She had to do whatever she could to keep him safe.

He seemed to get that about her – when he finally moved, it was to extend a hand in her direction. “You want to get some ice cream? We can talk about boundaries – when I need your help, and when I need you to leave me alone.”

Parker thought about it for a second, then nodded. “You’re buying.”

Grinning, Eliot took her hand. “Wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t.”


End file.
